Blue Tit Webcam - Part Three

The final instalment of our Blue Tit webcam began with one healthy chick remaining in the nest. The second chick had been slow to feed. One night it disappeared. We assume that it must have died in the night and was removed by the parent bird. The top photo shows the remaining chick snuggled up in the nest with its mother.


The chick changed and grew daily, gaining more and more markings and characteristics of an adult Blue Tit.

The unhatched eggs were still in the nest.

In this fuzzy picture, both the parent birds arrived at once to feed the chick.

The days went by, but a change came on the seventeenth day after hatching. We switched on the webcam images in the morning to find that the mother bird, so diligent and always with her chick when not out finding food, had disappeared. 

 The hungry chick was peeping and moving around its nest. We feared that it had been abandoned.

At last, the male bird appeared with a maggot and fed his chick. He seemed to realise that it was now his job to care for this youngster and he went off hunting again. For two days, the male bird fed the chick, who grew rapidly and began to spread his wings and hop around inside the nest box.

The mother never returned. She must have been predated by a magpie, a crow, a sparrow hawk or a cat. Our own cats are on curfew while the birds are fledging, but it could have been the black cat from along the lane.

A sad ending for a hard working and attentive little bird, but that is the way that nature works.

Here is the male bird feeding his chick.

Last Friday, in the middle of the morning, the bird had flown!
Mr DW went outside to see both parent and chick on the roof of the house, not far from the nest box.
The chick was fed and then both birds flew off together. We hope that they reached the cover of a nearby old oak tree and that one healthy chick and his father escape the predators and have the chance to live.